Dig deeper into your p-card data

But why? That’s the question we always asked as children, but as we get older and busier we seem to spend more time dealing with situations and never have quite enough time to figure out why they happened in the first place.

As a P-Card Manager, it’s not surprising that you don’t have time to figure out why one of your P-Card users misused or abused their card. Like most managers, you spend your days solving one problem after another while also trying to grow your program.

Oddly enough, the best way to grow your program is to get ahead of any potential misuse and abuse before it impacts the business. You need to determine what caused the issue to occur so that you can implement changes to prevent them from re-occurring. But where do you find the time to do this?

Getting to the root of the problem

With continuous monitoring technology, not only would you be automatically and immediately notified of the first instance of misuse, you would also be able to quickly discover the cause of the issue. For example, you receive two alerts from an employee booking travel accommodations.

While these are perfectly legitimate expenses, the bookings are with a non-preferred vendor and, in turn, cost more. After sending a quick email to the employee using the card, you discover they are new to the organization and were not provided with the preferred vendor list. Problem solved. You have to wonder, though: how much money could have been lost had you not been immediately notified of the misuse or discovered the root cause?

New insights for your program—and the business

The interactive dashboards within continuous monitoring software are key to helping you quickly determine root causes, not only for individual cases but also quarterly or yearly results. Let’s say while reviewing the third-quarter results you notice a significant spike in exceptions. Quickly drilling down on that dashboard, you determine the top exceptions amounts are coming from the marketing department.

When you drill down further, you notice several members of the marketing team are making a large number of what appears to be personal purchases at restaurants. Immediately you ask yourself, “Why is this happening?”

Identifying the root cause allows you to determine and address control weaknesses. Maybe members of the marketing team are abusing their cards, or maybe they simply need a reminder of organizational policies for P-Card use.

Either way, after spending less than five minutes in the system you now have the information you need to follow-up with the team to ensure they know the policies and/or to recoup any monies owed. You may also discover that P-Card users need more training before they are given their cards.

About Anu Sood

Anu Sood (LinkedIn | Twitter) is the Director Marketing at CaseWare RCM and is responsible for the company’s global marketing strategy. She has over 20 years of experience in product development, product management, product marketing, corporate communications, demand generation, content marketing and strategic marketing in high-tech industries.